THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me begin by thanking you for the
wonderful welcome, thanking you for being here for Mary. Tony and
Kristine, I have now been in your home and Slam Jam's. (Laughter.) And
I like them both very much. Thank you so much for opening your home to
a few of your friends today. It is a wonderful act of generosity.

I'd like to thank all the candidates who are here. They've all
been introduced, but I thank them for coming. I thank Mayor Coyne and
David Leland and Mayor Starr and -- Mayor Coyne, thank you for being
here. I would like to say also a special word of appreciation to David
Leland and the work that he has done with the Ohio Democratic Party. I
think it's one of the best state Democratic Parties in the entire United
States, and I thank you. And I thank all of these legislators and
others who are here who were a part of that. (Applause.)

I'd like to thank Tony and Kristine for having their family here,
and I'd like to thank Mary for having her mother, her husband, her kids
-- her whole family here. This has turned out to be a family affair.

I'd also like to say a special word of thanks -- I always try to
do this when I come to Ohio. You know, the press said that I would be
the nominee of the Democratic Party when I won the Ohio primary in 1992.
And then at the Democratic Convention in New York, Ohio's votes put me
over the top officially. (Applause.) And then on Election Night in
1992, all the experts didn't predict that I was a winner until Ohio
flashed on the screen for the Clinton-Gore ticket. And I thank you for
that. (Applause.) And then in 1996, our margin of victory here was
more than tripled over 1992. And I thank you for that. It took a lot
of heartache away from me on Election Day, so I thank you for all that.
(Applause.)

As Tony has already said, I would like to say a special word of
appreciation to the family of Tom Corey for continuing to sponsor and
support this event, for the love they had for him. And I would like to
say a special word of appreciation for the feeling he had for the First
Lady. We talked about that a little tonight. She is down in Uruguay,
having the second of her Vital Voices conferences. That's a group that
she's organized all over the world -- starting, I might, add for the
Irish here, in Northern Ireland. (Applause.) To organize women
committed to peace and to economic development and to good
family-supportive policies. So I wish she could be here.

But I would like to thank Robert, Thomas, Tracy, Terry, and Robert
for being here and for what the Coreys have meant in their support of
me. And thank you for supporting Mary today. Yes, give them a hand
again. (Applause.)

I want you to know why I came here today. I'm here to support
Mary Boyle for the Senate. I'm here to support her because she's got an
outstanding record in public service, because she has good values and
good positions on the issues -- you just heard them. I came here
because I like her, I have confidence in her, and because if enough of
you help her, she can win this election in November and make a big
difference to the future of the United States. (Applause.)

Ohio in so many ways is so representative of America. And it's
important that you understand that a senator from Ohio, in a very
profound sense, can represent America and the best in America, and can
have a profound impact on the future of this country, simply by doing
what's best for you.

John Glenn called me the night before last, just to tell me to
hang in there and express his support and friendship. We've had a
wonderful relationship. But he called me also one more time to thank me
for letting him go up in that spaceship --(laughter) -- because he was
going down to Florida to complete his last training. First of all, he
told me he was too old to be in the Senate, and then he asked me if he
could go into space. (Laughter.) When he said that, I didn't think we
could get anybody to run for the Senate. I thought everybody would be
mortally terrified. (Laughter.)

But when I think about that -- you should think about what kind of
person you want to replace John Glenn, because he not only represented
you, America looked to him. And not just because he went up in space
early, but because of what he represented after he came down. And I
think you need to think about that.

You know, when I ran for President in 1992, except for President's
Carter's term, we hadn't had much success at electing presidents since
1968. And I said to the American people and to the people of Ohio,
look, I'd like to take a different approach to the country's problems.
I'd like to put an end to a lot of this partisan bickering in Washington
and the shouting back and forth. And I believe that a lot of what we're
hearing about national government is just flat wrong. I don't believe
that you can help business by hurting labor. I think a good economic
policy is pro-business and pro-labor. (Applause.) I don't believe you
can grow the economy by destroying the environment. Over the long-run,
that's a loser. I think we have to prove that we can improve the
environment as we grow the economy.

I don't believe that you can just jail your way out of the crime
problem. Sure, people should be punished, but the best policy is to
keep kids out of trouble in the first place with a sensible prevention
policy. (Applause.) I don't believe people on welfare who can work
should be on welfare. I think they ought to have to work. But I don't
think when they go to work their children ought to be punished by losing
their nutrition and their health care benefits. (Applause.)

If you took a totally non-political poll of families, and you ask
them what they were really worried about -- working people with children
-- most people would tell you, even in upper-income levels, that what
they really worry about is how to properly balance their job at work and
their job at home , which is still the most important job in America,
raising your kids. Most everybody would tell you that. (Applause.)

So I say, if you vote for me, I'll try to reform the welfare
system to make people work who ought to work, but I'm not going to make
them sacrifice their responsibilities to their kids. There's got to be
a way to balance these two things. And that's what we've done.

I said there was a way to bring the deficit down and continue to
invest in education, in health care, in research, in making this country
strong. I felt that America could be more active than we had been in
promoting peace and freedom and prosperity around the world. And the
American people gave me and Al Gore and Hillary and our whole team a
chance to see whether we were right or not.

And when we celebrated a couple of days ago the first balanced
budget in 29 years, the biggest surplus in the history of the country,
the biggest surplus as a percentage of our economy since the 1950s, it
came at a time when we also had the lowest unemployment rate in 28
years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the smallest percentage of
people on welfare in 29 years, the lowest inflation ration in 32 years,
with the smallest federal government in 35 years, and the highest home
ownership in the history of the country. I am proud that we were able
to work together to achieve those results for the United States.
(Applause.)

Now, let me tell you why this election is important.
It's important for two reasons. First of all, we've got to decide
what to do with this moment. That's the big issue. And let me say, I
can't thank you enough, a lot of you who came by and said hello to me
earlier, for the very kind personal things you said to me and, through
me, to my wife. But I want you to understand something very clearly.
If I had to do it all over again, every day, I would do it in a
heartbeat, to see America where it is today as compared to six years
ago. (Applause.)

I want you to understand, too, that we all have to live with the
consequences of our mistakes in life. Most of us don't have to live
with it in quite such a public way. (Laughter.) But nobody gets out of
this life for free. Nobody does. And so that's not the real point.

The other thing I want you to understand is that in this election
all this adversity is not our enemy. The adversity is our friend. The
Mayor and Mary and I were just walking on the street not very long ago.
We talked to a lot of people that couldn't afford to be here today. But
they might vote now because they understand that there are big issues at
stake. Adversity is not our friend -- adversity is our friend;
complacency is our enemy.

If you listen to people talk on the other side about why they're
going to do well in these congressional elections, they'll tell you -- I
mean privately. They tell me, oh, we're going to do very well, Mr.
President, in these midterms because we have so much more money than you
do, than you Democrats, and because they're midterm elections and the
people that came out and voted for you for President in 1996, a lot of
them won't show up in 1998 because it's not a presidential election.

The people that were good enough to serve you here at this event
today, they've got a lot of hassles in their life. A lot of them have
to worry about child care. A lot of them have to worry about
transportation. They've got a lot of things on their mind. And the
other guys say, just bluntly, you know, those people -- working people
on modest incomes, younger people with kids to deal with, along with
their jobs, minorities who may live in inner cities that are too far
away from the polling place to walk, and not have transportation --
don't worry, they won't show up. Adversity is our friend because it
will focus us on what is at issue here.

And what is at issue here is what are we going to do with this
moment of prosperity? That's why this Senate seat is so important to
Ohio and to the country. And I want you to think about it just a
minute. Yes, we're doing well. I said all that, I just told you.
We're doing very well. I'm grateful for that. I had some role in it
and so did you. When Mary Boyle said, we produced the surplus, she was
not wrong. You paid the money into the IRS. And you got up and went to
work every day. And a lot of you created a lot of those new jobs. I
didn't do that; we did that. My goal in Washington was to have the
policies that would establish the conditions and give you the tools so
that you could do the job. That's the way America works.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: And one Ukrainian. (Laughter.) Probably some
Jewish Americans, probably some others. This is America. And this is
what I try to do not just for our party, but for our country. Just say,
look, you know -- you look around the world and people are so troubled
because of their racial, their ethnic, their religious, their political
differences. They're killing each other. If we want to be a good
influence in the rest of the world, we have to be good at home. We have
to prove that what we have in common is more important than our
differences. That's the only way we can celebrate our differences in a
civil way.

And I'm proud of that -- of the work we've done for peace in
Bosnia and Northern Ireland and Haiti and the Middle East. A lot of you
talked to me about the Middle East today -- we had Mr. Arafat and Mr.
Netanyahu here a few days ago. They talked alone for the first time in
a year. We spent an hour and a half together, and they're coming back
in a few days -- little over a week. And we're going to work and work
and work and try to take the next big step in the peace process. These
things are important. (Applause.) But what you need to understand is,
in large measure, it all rests on you.

Now, I have said that when things -- we have two things going on.
Number one, America is doing very well. Right? Number one.
(Applause.) Number two, America is doing very well in a very fast
changing world, where events are changing every day. You see it. You
see the financial crisis around the world. You see the troubles in
Kosovo. When I was riding through the neighborhood there was young
woman that had a sign that said, "Please help Kosovo."

Now, what are we going to do with this moment? I think we have to
use it to deal with the big long-term challenges of the country. In
this election, it means at a minimum don't spend the surplus until we
fix Social Security for the baby boom generation so that they can retire
in dignity without hurting --so we, I'm one of them -- (laughter) -- so
that we can retire in dignity without hurting our children and our
grandchildren's standard of living. That is a huge issue. (Applause.)

Now, members of the other party are going to fan out all across
America and say, we're trying to give you an election year tax cut -- I
mean, it's just a few weeks before the election, we're trying to give it
to you. And that mean old President and his party won't come across.
But it's not very much money, and we waited 29 years and we worked hard
for six years to see the red ink turn to black and I'd kind of like to
watch it dry for a day or two before we squander it. (Applause.)

People like Mary's mother, their Social Security is secure.
You're 60 years old, now, your Social Security will be fine. But if we
don't make some modest changes in the system, by the time all of us baby
boomers retire and there are only two people working for every one
person drawing, we will only have one of two bad alternatives. If
you're between 34 and 52, you're in the baby boom generation. When you
get into Social Security, if we don't make some changes, we'll have one
of two alternatives. We'll either have to put a whopping tax increase
on our kids so that we can continue to sustain the present system,
undermining our children's ability to raise our grandchildren; or
they'll have to put a whopping cut in Social Security benefits on us,
undermining the security of our retirement. Not everybody is going to
have as good a pension as I do, you know. (Laughter.) And it's a
serious thing. It's a serious thing.

Half the senior citizens in this country today would be in poverty
were it not for the Social Security system. Now, people say, well, how
can you do this with the election four and a half weeks away and the tax
cut something you get right away and we're looking to the future?
America is around here after 220 years because when we needed to do it
we always looked to the future. And I trust the American people to say,
we prefer to put Social Security first and to save it. I think that's
the right decision. (Applause.)

The second issue that's really big to me -- that you can see if
you see all this financial turmoil around the world -- 30 percent of our
growth comes from selling things to other countries, our products and
our services. And when we can't because they don't have any money, we
suffer.

There are a bunch of farmers in North Dakota today, if you went up
and told them these were America's best times, they would think that you
needed a serious mental health examination. (Laughter.) Why? Because
they sell wheat and we sell half our wheat overseas and 40 percent of it
to Asia, and they don't have any money to buy their wheat. And farm
income has dropped to nothing. We're going to lose this year, unless
the Congress passes the emergency agricultural legislation I sent, we
could lose 10,000 American farmers this year -- family farmers.

So I say, we've got to take the lead in trying to do the following
things. Number one, we've got to try to limit this financial crisis in
Asia and Russia before it spreads to Latin America where our biggest
markets are, our fastest growing ones. Number two, we've got to try to
help them, our friends in Latin America and Russia, if they will do the
right things, get back on their feet so they can grow again and
participate with us. And number three, we've got to make some changes
in the world financial and trade system so that it works for ordinary
people.

Freedom and free enterprise will not be embraced forever around
the world unless it works for ordinary people. The reason we've still
got this system here is that most people, every time an election comes
around, believes that freedom and free markets and free enterprise are
good systems. And if they didn't, the voters would have changed them
here a long time ago. Now, we've got to do that.

So I never thought in my life -- if anybody ever told me when I
came to Washington that funding for the International Monetary Fund
would be an issue in an election, I never would have believed it. Most
people, if you talk about the IMF, most people don't know what it means.
But what the IMF means today is continued economic opportunity for the
people of the United States of America. Now, I have been waiting eight
months for the Congress to fund what we owe to the IMF. The United
States has got to lead the world out of this financial mess and we've
got to do it before it bites us and our friends in Europe, and even
sooner, our friends in Latin America.

If you want -- a lot of people here are concerned about the Middle
East peace -- one of the reasons we need to hurry up is the abject
poverty in which too many people, not only Palestinians, but others --
Jordanians -- others in the Middle East are living in. We can't help
them unless there is a general climate of growth and investment in the
world. This is a big deal. But it's become a partisan political issue
in Washington, so after eight months we still don't have it.

So if you want to send a message that you expect your country to
protect your jobs and your businesses and your future, then you've got
to support our program to keep America leading the way in the world
economy. It's very important and very simple. (Applause.)

I'll just mention one other issue. I know I'm preaching to the
saved here today, but when I leave you're going to be here and you've
got to go talk to other people. The third issue is education. Now, I'm
really proud of the fact that in the bipartisan balanced budget bill we
opened the doors of college wider than ever before because our party's
initiative, my administration's initiative, was embraced -- tax credits
for all four years of college, for graduate school; deductibility of
interest on student loans; more scholarships through the Pell Grant
program; more work-study programs.

That's great. Everybody knows now we've done that. But what we
have not done is made our elementary and secondary schools the best in
the world, no matter where children live, what their race is, what their
income is, what their circumstances are. You know that.

Now, I gave the Congress eight months ago an education program,
fully paid for. Here's what it does. It would provide 100,000 teachers
to take class size in the early grades down to an average of 18. All
the research shows that's the most important thing you can do to give
kids a good start in life and the benefits are permanent. That's the
first thing it does.

The second thing it does is provide a tax incentive program to
help rebuild and repair or build 5,000 schools. Why is that important?
I visited a little school district -- a little school district in
Florida the other day where one school had 12 trailers in the back for
classrooms. It's the biggest group of kids ever in school -- the first
group bigger than the baby boomers. In Philadelphia, where I'm going
when I leave you, the average school building is 65 years old. I
visited a school where the whole floor is shut down.

We tell our kids they're the most important thing in the world;
what do we say to them if they walk up the steps of the school and the
windows are broken and the floors are closed and they can't even look
out the window in a lot of these places? And they're not safe.

This program also would provide funds to school districts who
would do like Chicago did and say, we're not going to have any more
social promotion -- you've got to prove that you know what you're
supposed to know to go to the next grade. But we will not tell you,
children, that you are failures just because the system failed. So if
you don't make the grade, we'll send you to after-school programs, we'll
send you to summer school programs, we'll give you tutors. The Chicago
school system's summer school is now the sixth biggest school district
in the United States of America.

And I want to do that everywhere. I think every child deserves
not to be defrauded in education. You're not doing them a favor if you
promote them if they don't know anything; but you're sure not doing them
a favor if you brand them a failure because the system failed them. So
give them the after-school program and give them the summer school
program. (Applause.)

Now, this program expands our efforts for safe schools -- a big
issue now. It would hook up all the classrooms in the country, no
matter how poor or rural they are, to the Internet by the year 2000.
That's what it does -- eight months, no action.

Now, what is the record of the other party? What have they done
with their year in the majority? And keep in mind, I have done my best
to work in a bipartisan way. We got a few Republicans -- after no
Republicans on our budget bill, we got a few for the Brady Bill, we got
a few for the crime bill to put 100,000 police on the street. We had a
genuine bipartisan effort -- big majorities in both parties finally for
the welfare bill, after I vetoed the first two because it took the
health and nutrition benefits away from the families. And now it's
going in the other direction, in the wrong direction.

What have they done? They killed the minimum wage increase for 12
million Americans. They killed campaign finance reform. They killed
the tobacco reform legislation that would have put in billions of
dollars to protect our children from the danger of tobacco, still the
number one public health problem in America today. They killed the
patients' bill of rights that says that you have a right to go to the
nearest emergency room if you're in an accident, to see a specialist if
you need one, to keep your doctor even if your health provider changes
while you're pregnant or in chemotherapy or some other reason. They've
actually gone backwards in protecting the environment -- there are all
kinds of assaults on the environment in their budget. They have gone
backwards at protecting Social Security first with this House tax bill.
And there has been no action on the International Monetary Fund and the
education.

And this shows a larger set of different attitudes. I believe
with all my heart that we're up there not to fight with each other about
where we are on the totem pole, but to fight for you to make sure you
and your children have a better, safer, freer future. That's what I
think we're there for. (Applause.)

If you want to send a message to Washington that you want your
interests put first, that you want progress over partisanship, that you
want people over politics, that you believe in Social Security first,
education is our top investment priority, and keeping the economy going
-- if you want to send that message, the best way in the world you could
ever send that message is to send Mary Boyle to the United States
Senate.